It tells you something notable about the world of the 2020s that Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech to the Munich Security Conference earned a brief standing ovation. Put the same speech in the mouth of any Republican politician from the Iraq war through the late 2010s, and its themes and flourishes would have been seen as essentially reactionary — maybe understandably so, given American piety and jingoism, but certainly not a tone that sophisticated and progressive Europeans ought to welcome.
Now, though, a call to control borders and rebuild military and industrial might and to prioritize national interests over international institutions and Western civilization over global citizenship — all rooted in a vision of the trans-Atlantic relationship as an extension of Europe’s Christian heritage and its empire-building and missionary-sending past — well, if that right-wing vision of the European-American relationship is what it takes to keep the United States invested in NATO, then at least some European elites are willing to stand up and applaud.
This is, in fact, the rough bargain that the American right is offering to Europe at the moment. There has been a lot of talk about the potential abandonment of our European alliance by an American populism that supposedly holds the Old World in disdain. But it’s closer to the mark to say that the American right often identifies powerfully with Europe, but the Europe it wants to love is not the Europe that’s been built over the past few generations, so American conservatives are trying to alter the beloved as the price of their affection.
Which leaves European elites with a complicated set of options. If they join the applause for Rubio at Munich — saying, in effect, “I don’t care why you love me, as long as you love me” — they are continuing in a relationship knowing that their partner expects them to change, to become more nationalist, religious, free-market-oriented and better armed. They can actually try to make that kind of change (the preference of some of the continent’s nationalists), or they can wait and hope that the American demand will change or soften over time (with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Munich tour a source of hope for that potential future). Or more radically, they can refuse the relationship entirely and look for partners who seem to love them as they are (like India, with which the European Union just concluded a big trade-and-migration deal).
As an American conservative with Europhilic tendencies, I naturally think the first option is the best for Europe’s future. Just because a message is associated with President Trump doesn’t make it worth ignoring, and Europe would be better off in almost every way if it moved in the direction suggested by the Rubio address: more politically stable if it successfully limited mass migration, more dynamic if it chose deregulation over deindustrialization, more optimistic and creative and fecund if it recovered religious faith, more capable of defending its ideals if it spent more money on defense.
But American conservatives should also be clear about the tensions inherent in their appeal for European change. The obvious one divides Rubio from his boss: When the secretary of state says, “We Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel,” he’s pretending that we didn’t just have a pointless mini-crisis over Greenland in which the Trumpian ask wasn’t “direct and urgent” so much as immoral and destructive, less a demand for healthy change than an abusive demand for submission.
A more general tension is that American conservatives tend to downplay how much of the European transformation — the shift, over time, to weakness from power, to decadence from self-belief — was actively encouraged by American power brokers. As my colleague Christopher Caldwell put it in December, if Europe today seems “vitiated” and “enfeebled,” this destiny was imposed and not just chosen: “It was at America’s urging that they undertook this work of self-destruction in the first place.”
In his Munich speech, Rubio told a story about the post-World War II moment in which the trans-Atlantic alliance saved Europe from both Communist victory and postimperial decay. But the reality is much more complex. From Franklin Roosevelt pressuring Winston Churchill to weaken the British Empire to Dwight Eisenhower treating France and Britain coldly in the Suez crisis, American policy often encouraged Europe’s retreat from global power. And the same pattern continued, in varying ways, through the post-Cold War era and the war on terrorism, when Bush-era conservatives imagined that they could run a global imperium more efficiently if they ignored or overruled Old Europe.
In effect, then, today’s American conservatives are suggesting that past American elites were often wrong and that Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, and for that matter, Jacques Chirac, were often right. (Indeed, JD Vance said that explicitly last year.) Even if that new advice is good counsel, it still can feel like a betrayal given the radically different demands that came before.
And Europeans could be forgiven for wondering if the new advice is completely different from the old advice because American conservatives can’t always decide which kind of right-wing Europe they would like to see.
Sometimes, as in Rubio’s speech, it’s a militarily robust, outward-looking, growth-oriented Europa. But sometimes, as in American populist sympathy for some of the more inward-looking and protectionist styles of European nationalism, it looks more like a bunkered, diminished and fragmented continent — one that cuts immigration, stays out of America’s way on the world stage and manages its decline in a manner that’s congenial to American tourists who like old churches and good food.
It’s not always clear, in other words, whether the American right would really welcome an ambitious, dynamic, Gaullist Europe — or whether it would prefer right-wing Eurocrats in the mold of Xan Lyppiatt, the dictator of a dying England in P.D. James’s prophetic novel “The Children of Men,” who serves as a kind of museum curator for a society at ebb tide.
“We do not want our allies to be weak,” Rubio said in Munich. For the trans-Atlantic relationship to change in the way that he desires, that promise needs to be proved out. Because from the Eisenhower era to the age of Trump, we have often given Europeans good reason to think otherwise.
Breviary
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